Living The User Life

Useless user personas and taking reponsibility

There’s a lot of talk about user personas, having diversity in your user’s personas, blah blah. I do not deny them and don’t say that they don’t work. But the thing is that if you don’t live the life of your users, most likely all your personas (no matter how accurate they are) will fail.

When you sit in an office and gather data from Facebook profiles for building user personas, that’s not how you create great products. Browsing the Internet and doing only 2–3 interviews is not how you gain responsibility for what you put out in the world. Doing research in a “lab”? Haven’t seen more interestingly useless approach for product design.

My concern is that we hide so much behind stupidly rational and smart theories, buzzwords, numbers, that we forget to go out and live a day in the life of our users. But there’s also the other side of the coin. Some take the approach of user personas, say how wrong it is, and then add another level of bullshit on how to improve it, rather than go out and live the life of your users.

People who see complicated solutions do not have an incentive to put in place obvious ones. As we saw, a bureaucratized system will increase in complication from the interventionism of people who sell complicated solutions because that’s what their position and training invite them to do. Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse). There is no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication. Anyone who has submitted a “scholarly” paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary. Further, there are side effects for problems that grow nonlinearly with such branching-out complications. Worse: Non-skin-in-the-game people don’t get simplicity — Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game

So rather than complicating your users’ personas and add another bull***t layer of complexity, go out. Eat your own dog food and ask people how they feel about your product. See how they use it in real life, not a lab. Why? Because formal usability is too stiff. And lab settings don’t reflect the…